Afterparties : Stories

I'm ashamed to say that I didn't know of Anthony Veasna So until reading his obituary in The New York Times, and now that I've read this collection I'm saddened anew at the loss of this bright young author.

I normally prefer novels to short stories, but just a single line from that obituary compelled me to immediately add Afterparties to the top of my reading queue. I'm happy to say that that impulse was well-founded, as the rest of the collection is just as sharp, original, and darkly funny as I could have hoped for. Those who have read the piece have perhaps guessed, but for the curious, the aforementioned line was:

Tevy, he writes, would “do something as simple as drink a glass of ice water, and her father, from across the room, would bellow, “There were no ice cubes in the genocide!”

These sentiments pervade the collection, and the central tension of many of the stories is generational: parents dealing with the trauma of staggering loss and the pressures of surviving in a new country, and their children, whose problems are minor by comparison but no less consuming. These children, who So centers more often than the older generation, struggle in trying to understand and honor the past, while grappling with the uncertainties of their own futures. He captures this beautifully in the last story of the collection, which is also perhaps the most intimate. The story, “Generational Differences,” takes the form of a letter from a mother to her intensely and morbidly curious son, who can't stop asking about “the regime, the camps, the genocide.” The mother writes:

Every slight detail you would demand to know, as if understanding that part of my life would explain the entirety of yours.

The title is a giveaway, but So was fascinated with what comes after: after the genocide, after immigrating, after college, after the mass shooting, after death. I'm sad that we won't get to see what would have come after Afterparties, because I'm certain it would have been fantastic.

Thanks to Ecco for the ARC.